I have never played a mainline Dragon Quest, but I have heard good things about them. Not really top level "hype" because I know absolutely nothing about the franchise and especially this particular entry, but I was interested enough to put it on my amazon wishlist in May. I have my eye on it.

Yeah, currently have Nier Automata, Ni No Kuni 2, Witcher 3, Nioh, Breath of the Wild and Persona 5 NG+ queued up so that might be my 2018 schedule filled.

I've definitely heard it mentioned as the top JRPG series but I think only one of them was ever released on home console outside of Japan before this. I know there have been DS ports but I'm not much of a handheld guy.

Seph said he was looking forward to this one more than Octopath so going to assume he will be all over this if he ever made it through the gate.

When I was 5 or 6 years old, one of the first games I got for the NES was Dragon Warrior. It turned me of so much, I didn't play another RPG again until Final Fantasy 7.

Opposite. I liked the mechanic being drastically different than "jump on this guy" or "run right and shoot". Even hybrid games like Crystalis, though one of my favorites, didn't quite scratch that turn-based itch. Final Fantasy and the NES port of Ultima Exodus easily ate at least one school year's worth of free time (until my dad got a lucky break in Ultima, which soured me on that game for a long while. He still thinks it's funny I got pissed).

However, I could have easily been on the same boat as you if Hydlide was my first one, which it almost was.

Yeah it is, outside of a couple boss fights. I've read that if you like a challenge you should play it on hard. It seems that difficulty is tuned to what most people like us actually want. That would have been useful information before we started though, wouldn't it?

I've also read a little bit about these "draconian" settings that you can enable on subsequent playthroughs that really seem like they could make this game incredibly hard.

And yes Veronica is such a bitch and I love her as well. I also enjoy Sylvando because they went over the top with him. He's so flamboyant and his voice actor nails the role. I always get a good laugh from scenes he has a good amount of involvement in.

And yeah DQ11 is a classic JRPG in every sense. Really enjoyable. I was wish i had set the difficulty higher but the story and characters totally hold my attention. Im doing less encounters to keep my level low and its making for a better time

And yeah DQ11 is a classic JRPG in every sense. Really enjoyable. I was wish i had set the difficulty higher but the story and characters totally hold my attention. Im doing less encounters to keep my level low and its making for a better time

This is exactly what I did. I was grinding a little at first, now I just coast. When I go through an area I might fight one battle against each diff enemy type on the overworld. Now I occasionally run into stronger enemies that can be a bit troublesome and the bosses actually seem threatening. There are a couple that legit whooped me a few times. Then theres been some where it was a skin of my teeth win, out of MP and items and people dead and just manage to pull it off.

Man I cant wait for you to catch up a bit to where I'm at. There's this story event I want to talk about but obviously would be spoiling it for you. You'll know when it happens though. It's such a rare story beat for an RPG to take and they have some big shoes to fill in regards to the previous games that tried it.

Indeed. I learned a valuable trick last night that may help you in your adventure. I'm sure you see how the skill unlock board works by now....but I found out that you can buy a bunch of panels to unlock some distant panel on the board, then refund all the points you spent to get to it at a priest while keeping the ability you wanted

Act 2 is kinda strange in that the story is more free form. There is an order it should be done in and a little gating at times to stop you from going to certain places, but if you make it to somewhere that has a part in the story it will trigger the scenes and let you do it even if you havent done everything before it yet. It doesnt ryin anything as these situations are kind of independent from one another, but still, its odd.

I happened upon a boss a couple days ago thinking it was side content. It wrecked me though so I eventually left. Come to find out later that its actually a story boss from much later on and gives you an item you need. However if I had happened to already do it I could just progress immediately. Kinda strange to see that in an old school jrpg. But yeah, just know, if you run into something stupid hard just go elsewhere and progress other bits of the story first.

The acts are broken up by when they make sidequests available, best I can tell. Before Yggdrasil the list only has 26, afterwards it changes and goes up to 47, and after another event later on it will go up again.

I have finally reached a boss I can't beat either. Well, I could, but only a couple people will survive and I want that experience haha. Gotta grind I spose. Getting close to the end I think, regardless.